Fascinating. I think the reporter has some points, but he also seems to be unaware of some of the the fundamental realities of optical physics. There is also the basic fact that a person will need to parse immense quantities of information to locate and isolate still images. Nonetheless, this will probably come to full fruition in the next five years (it’s practically already here in the 5DII and 7D and other brand equivalents). For consumers who have an existing low threshold of need (ex. snapshots of memories are all they actually want) it will be a big seller. For professionals, and advanced creatives, it will just be another tool in the bag. To be used or not, depending on the desired end product.

Me

Those are high quality lights.. but quite different in practice then strobes.. you can’t freeze action for instance.. and I don’t think you can use them on location with a small battery (e.g. Profoto 600R, or B2).

It sounds like an amazing camera wich can have it’s use, but I don’t think that way of shooting can replace all photography as we know it nowadays.

Ilja makes a great point. For serious photographers, this’ll never catch on.

It keeps the whole image in focus at all times? Well great! But what if I don’t always WANT the whole image in focus? Isn’t that why I spend close to $2K for my f2.8 lenses? Not to mention what a pain it’ll be to sift through 4 hours of video to find the one frame you like.

The only “wonder camera” I’d ever want is a 8mm-1600mm constant f1 (yes, you read that right). Anything less is merely a gimmick!

First, who wants everything in focus all the time? That sounds boring. A lot of us paid extra for fast L lenses so everything wouldn’t be in focus all the time.

Second, who wants to sit through 45 minutes of video looking for a couple of keeper stills? Seems like a random way of creating still images. Why not use photographer drone robots that just wonder around shooting video of everything. Then just sort out the good stuff in post.

There are some interesting concepts here, but I’m not convinced Canon (0r anyone else, really) knows what we’ll be doing 1-2 decades from now.

I loved the tethered backpack/w cables. Nothing says 21st century like cables. I wonder if there were a couple of car batteries hidden under the stage.

I agree with the comments. While cool and useful for some tasks this really feels like a solution looking for a problem. What would be really great is the ability to select which moments you want to capture, right on the spot, and dump the rest of the information, I bet that will cost extra. With storage reaching a claimed “near-infinity” the problem becomes how to organize and share more information than anyone knows what to do with.

Already many consumers card dump to online sharing sites. If they aren’t willing to sort their 1000 vacation photos down to 100, then I doubt tmany are willing to sort hours of movies down to a few choice stills.

This technology would be great as a high speed ‘burst’ mode, taking say a 1-5 second clip every press of the button, so it would function like a still camera that provides a bit of buffer, reducing the annoyance of people blinking or walking in-front of the camera.

That they have taken what could be the next step in the consumer video camera revolution and tried to apply it to still photography suggests to me that Canon doesn’t have any idea where the future is headed anymore than tazo tea leaves. I expect in 50 years we will be viewing some of these gadget clips the same way we treat 1950s clips of the future with jetpacks and flying cars and room sized tape reel computers.

This will happen and film will die. It is already being used on major motion pictures to pull images for advertising. When Nikon and Kodak snuffed their nose at digital they lost years of technological advances against Canon who embraced the evolution of photography. When you have innovators like the developers of the Red camera anyone can see where a little ingenuity can go, when are people going to wake up and realize that cell phones, solar panels and heart valves were all dreams that are now reality. Bye Bye film, it was nice to have held my profession in your time and I will always remember how fun it was to mix all those chemicals and print in the darkroom….